Valthirian Arc: Hero School Story

About

Valthirian Arc: Hero School Story is a single player tactical role playing game with fantasy and anime themes. It was developed by Agate and was released on October 2, 2018. It received mostly positive reviews from critics and neutral reviews from players.

Valthirian Arc: Hero School Story casts you as the Principal of a small academy in the troubled world of Valthiria. As the newly recruited Principal, it’s up to you to start work on building an academy worthy of training the world’s heroes – students in the art of combat and magic.

Genres & Tags

Play Modes

Single-Player

Valthirian Arc: Hero School Story screenshot

Skip User Reviews

54%

Audience ScoreBased on 198 reviews

story43 positive mentions

grinding26 negative mentions

Charming blend of school management sim and light action RPG that offers a unique and addictive gameplay loop.
Cute and expressive chibi-style graphics with a pleasant soundtrack contribute to a relaxed atmosphere.
Engaging character progression with diverse classes and satisfying sense of growth while managing and graduating students.

Repetitive gameplay with limited mission variety and a slow pacing that leads to grinding, especially in mid-to-late game.
Numerous bugs and technical issues including crashing missions, poorly optimized controls, and game-breaking glitches.
Shallow school management aspect with limited building customization, forced graduations, and lack of meaningful narrative depth or replayability.

story
309 mentions Positive Neutral Negative
14%
82%
4%
The story in Valthirian Arc: Hero School Story is simple and charming, centered around managing a hero academy amid political turmoil and engaging in missions to train students. While the premise and worldbuilding hold potential and offer multiple endings, the narrative is often shallow, with spaced-out and forgettable events that lack impact, and repetitive, sometimes buggy missions that undermine immersion. Overall, the story adds a pleasant but unremarkable backdrop to an otherwise light and casual RPG-management experience.
- “Valthirian Arc: Hero School Story offers a charming blend of school management, light RPG mechanics, and fantasy adventure, inviting players to step into the role of a newly appointed principal tasked with rebuilding and leading a prestigious academy for young heroes.”
- “The premise is playful yet full of potential: you must balance academic growth, campus expansion, political expectations, and hands-on monster-fighting missions, all within a world caught in the middle of a shifting power struggle among five queendoms.”
- “The story has multiple endings, so there's replayability. It intersperses relaxing sections with less relaxing parts, and as you decide who goes on what quest when, you're in control of that pacing.”
- “Story events are spaced out and often lack impact, leaving the main plot feeling more like a distant echo than an active driving force.”
- “Both the main and branching quest story lines are quite abysmal and didn't really show a shred of being anything worth paying attention to.”
- “Additionally, the story is just a patchwork where you 'save the world from evil' and your choices don't matter, because there are none and the villains are flat and one dimensional.”
gameplay
67 mentions Positive Neutral Negative
13%
77%
10%
The gameplay of Valthirian Arc: Hero School Story offers a charming mix of school management and light RPG mechanics, creating a solid core loop of academy building and mission-based combat. However, it is generally seen as simplistic, repetitive, and somewhat shallow, lacking depth and challenging pacing, with occasional bugs and underwhelming implementation of some features. While enjoyable for casual or pick-up-and-play sessions, many players find it grindy and less fulfilling compared to earlier series entries or similar games.
- “Valthirian Arc: Hero School Story offers a charming blend of school management, light RPG mechanics, and fantasy adventure, inviting players to step into the role of a newly appointed principal tasked with rebuilding and leading a prestigious academy for young heroes.”
- “Combat, levelling, and strategy mechanics are quite diversified (and unique!) but easy to learn.”
- “Valthirian Arc successfully blends town-building, time-management type gameplay with an action-RPG hack-and-slash experience, which is exactly what it set out to do.”
- “The gameplay loop is, lightly put, unfulfilling.”
- “The whole game is far too simplistic, there's no real gameplay, no thought, or anything, plus it's broken.”
- “It's clunky, has bad difficulty pacing, many mechanics are poorly implemented.”
graphics
33 mentions Positive Neutral Negative
42%
49%
9%
The game's graphics receive mixed but generally positive feedback, praised for their charming, cute, and nostalgic anime and chibi art styles reminiscent of GameCube quality. While some users miss previous 2D or pixel art styles and note occasional issues like freezing or less impressive enhancements, most find the visuals appealing and fitting for the game’s aesthetic. However, a few critiques highlight repetitive character sprites and graphics comparable only to older console generations like the PS2.
- “The graphics are wonderful, the story is thought out, and side quests provide necessary experience to go through the story line.”
- “- Love the random character models and overall anime aesthetic.”
- “The chibi art style looks more like GameCube done right than a mobile game, and I love the aesthetic.”
- “Despite this, I am really disappointed by the artwork in Vahss.”
- “It also doesn't add anything except for a graphics enhancement that, if we're being honest, makes it look like a PS2 game.”
- “Graphics are not great.”
grinding
26 mentions Positive Neutral Negative
100%
Grinding in the game is a significant and often tedious aspect, becoming especially prominent in mid-to-late stages where repetitive dungeon runs and limited mission variety make progression feel more like a necessity than enjoyment. While some players appreciate the grind-heavy action RPG style, many find it monotonous, with balancing and leveling mechanics that can feel unbalanced or forced, detracting from immersion and overall fun. However, for those who enjoy steady progression through resource gathering and character upgrades, the game offers opportunities to grind without being overly punishing.
- “This repetition becomes especially noticeable during the mid-to-late game pathways, where grinding starts to feel more like a necessity than a natural extension of progression.”
- “This is not helped by the fact as you approach end game all the missions with decent XP dry up and you end up grinding the same crap mission.”
- “This is frustrating because when I am forced to graduate my high level students, it's really hard to get my new apprentices up to a workable level when the only options for grinding XP are the two 'training' missions that don't award XP for completion (and you earn a pitiful amount for defeating every creature on the map).”
music
18 mentions Positive Neutral Negative
33%
50%
17%
The game's music is generally described as pleasant and decent, creating a relaxed atmosphere and fitting various situations well. However, it lacks memorable or standout tracks, with some users finding it bland or irritating over time. While the victory and credits songs receive some praise, the soundtrack overall is considered basic and unremarkable.
- “The soundtrack is pleasant and unobtrusive, contributing to the relaxed atmosphere.”
- “Music is lovely and changes according to different situations.”
- “Without a doubt, the art and music are great, but that's about the only aspect I unreservedly enjoyed.”
- “Everything from the gameplay loop to the music, menus, maps, story feels like it was made to be the blandest possible.”
- “There is not even a single music track that I would associate with this game.”
- “No opening movie with a catchy song, no main music – unless we count the main menu’s one as such, and no soundtrack that I will remember after I complete the game.”
replayability
11 mentions Positive Neutral Negative
27%
46%
27%
Replayability is generally seen as lacking due to no new game+ mode, limited endgame content, and few options to replay quests. However, features like multiple story endings, randomized student enrollment, recipe mechanics, and recent updates allowing boss quests to be replayed do enhance replay value for some players. Overall, while there is potential, the game's replayability feels underdeveloped and could benefit from more robust post-game activities.
- “The story has multiple endings, so there's replayability.”
- “The randomized student enrollment can also improve the game's replayability because random enrollment can change the entire game drastically.”
- “After finishing the game, I eventually stopped playing because there's no endgame content at all, you couldn't even replay quests and you'll have nothing to do at the end, but after a while I saw info about an update that made boss quests replayable.”
- “Not only did I have to play this on my PS5 to get it to work, it also doesn't have a New Game+ mode or any kind of replayability!”
- “After finishing the game, I eventually stopped playing because there's no endgame content at all. You couldn't even replay quests and you had nothing to do at the end. But after a while, I saw info that there's an update to the game that the boss quests are now replayable.”
- “It doesn't offer any suitable endgame content, other than the hard quests you find near the end of the game. You will not find any more playable missions to level your heroes, except the training missions which suck if you want to reach high level. The final chapter at the end just offers errand missions.”
stability
8 mentions Positive Neutral Negative
100%
The game suffers from frequent bugs and glitches, including freezing, black screens, missing quest items, and party member AI issues, affecting overall stability. While some workarounds exist, the numerous technical problems and lack of polish hamper the gameplay experience.
- “Fun, simple fantasy school management simulation game, but it can get buggy. Later in the game, when you try to load and accept a mission, it does not load properly and gets a black screen. Restarting and loading the training mission first, which has fewer items to render, works for me.”
- “There are some issues with bugs or glitches: party members running in place and not following, ones who should be dead but aren't, or when closing and opening the window, time fast forwards unexpectedly.”
- “The game is still buggy. For example, in a quest requiring collecting 14 items, only 12 of them spawned on the map, leading to wasted time searching.”
optimization
7 mentions Positive Neutral Negative
43%
14%
43%
The game's optimization is inconsistent, with decent overall performance and minimal major bugs, but notable issues remain such as poor PC control support, lack of mouse integration, and long load times that feel excessive for its scope. Controller-centric design compromises the PC experience, indicating insufficient optimization for keyboard and mouse users.
- “I played Valthirian Arc II a lot, and this completely blows it out of the water, from gameplay to appearance to overall performance.”
- “There's little weird things like a tutorial page popping up when it shouldn't, but no major bugs or performance issues.”
- “That's right, performance!”
- “The controls felt janky on PC, so I figured it was probably controller optimized.”
- “But the real issue is with performance and bugs.”
- “Icons continue to refer to controllers, there is no real mouse support, no mouselook, no click to move, keys can't be bound to the mouse, etc. Clearly no optimization occurred: the load screens are what I expect from much larger, more intense games, not from something that can be adequately rendered in a browser.”
character development
3 mentions Positive Neutral Negative
100%
Character development is highlighted through bright, stylized visuals and expressive, appealing character designs that are integrated into missions, enhancing the overall enjoyment of the game.
- “The visual style is bright and stylized, with lush environments and expressive character designs.”
- “The character designs are nice and get used a bit in missions too.”
- “The game is fun and has cute character designs.”
humor
3 mentions Positive Neutral Negative
100%
The game's humor is reflected primarily through its amusing art style, which some players find entertaining but not enough to justify its price. While the humor adds charm, the gameplay and character classes feel generic, limiting the overall comedic impact.
atmosphere
1 mentions Positive Neutral Negative
100%
The atmosphere is relaxed and enhanced by a pleasant, unobtrusive soundtrack that complements the overall experience.
- “The soundtrack is pleasant and unobtrusive, contributing to the relaxed atmosphere.”

Skip Critic Reviews

62%Critics’ scoreBased on 6 critic reviews

Skip Game Offers

Buy Valthirian Arc: Hero School Story

20h Median play time

20h Average play time

20-20h Spent by most gamers

*Based on 3 analyzed playthroughs

Skip Videos

Videos

Skip Games Like Valthirian Arc: Hero School Story

57%417reviews

Adventurer Manager

2014

Casual Role Playing

81%4.7kreviews

Battle Chasers: Nightwar

2017

Open World Role Playing

+14

73%2.1kreviews

Dark Deity

2021

Tactical Role Playing

76%1.6kreviews

Edge of Eternity

2021

Role Playing

50%502reviews

Dungeon Rushers

2016

Tactical Role Playing

+10

More games like Valthirian Arc: Hero School Story

Skip FAQs

Frequently Asked Questions

Valthirian Arc: Hero School Story is a tactical role playing game with fantasy and anime themes.

Valthirian Arc: Hero School Story is available on PC, PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Windows and others.

On average players spend around 20 hours playing Valthirian Arc: Hero School Story.

Valthirian Arc: Hero School Story was released on October 2, 2018.

Valthirian Arc: Hero School Story was developed by Agate.

Valthirian Arc: Hero School Story has received mostly positive reviews from players and mostly positive reviews from critics. Most players liked this game for its story but disliked it for its grinding.

Valthirian Arc: Hero School Story is a single player game.

Similar games include Adventurer Manager, Battle Chasers: Nightwar, Dark Deity, Edge of Eternity, Dungeon Rushers and others.

Valthirian Arc: Hero School Story

Platforms